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This wide-ranging collection of essays, newly available in paperback, is the first book in English to examine the impact of Stalinist terror on Eastern Europe in the years 1940 to 1956.
Covering the Baltic states, Moldavia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, the authors investigate terror both ‘from above’, in the form of elite purges and show trials, and ‘from below’ in the guise of large-scale arrests and deportations of ordinary people. Key questions addressed include the relative importance of Soviet influence versus ‘local’ factors; the persecution of particular groups, such as ‘kulaks’, church leaders, the middle-class intelligentsia and members of non-communist left-wing parties; cases where repression was more, or conversely less, intense than elsewhere; and the relevance of key events such as the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, the Rajk trial of 1949 and the Slánský trial of 1952.
"The collected volume is a timely publication that fills in a significant gap in the English-language historiography of the establishment of Stalinist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe after World War Two. It may come as a surprise that this book is actually the first serious scholarly attempt to address the topic of Stalinist repressions from a comparative perspective, bringing together the findings of historians from the respective countries since the archival revolutions of the early 1990s."
(Balázs Apor: Slavonic and East European Review,vol. 92, no. 1, January 2014)
List of abbreviations and glossary of terms
List of archives and archival abbreviations
Notes on contributors
1. Stalinist terror in Eastern Europe: Problems, perspectives and interpretations - Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe
2. Soviet in form, local in content: Elite repression and mass terror in the Baltic States, 1940–53 - Aldis Purs
3. Stalinist terror in Soviet Moldavia, 1940–53 - Igor Casu
4. East Germany, 1945–53: Stalinist repression and internal Party purges - Matthew Stibbe
5. Stalinism in Poland, 1944–56 - Lukasz Kaminski
6. Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia: Origins, processes, responses - Kevin McDermott
7. Stalinist terror in Hungary, 1945-56 - László Borhi
8. Political purges and mass repression in Romania, 1948–55 - Dennis Deletant
9. Stalinist and anti-Stalinist repression in Yugoslavia, 1944–53 - Jerca Vodušek Staric
10. Stalinist terror in Bulgaria, 1944–56 - Jordan Baev
11. Purge and counter-purge in Stalinist Albania, 1944–56 - Robert C. Austin
List of major works cited
Index